Honda Brings a Self-Balancing Motorcycle to CES

Your days of embarrassing yourself on a bike are over.

Cars, sometimes unfairly, revel in the limelight for their advances involving new technologies when compared to their two-wheeled counterparts. But today at CES, Honda introduced a new technology that could be genuinely groundbreaking for the world of mobility.

Dubbed “Riding Assist” technology, it does exactly that: helps prevent a motorcycle from falling over when the bike is standing still. (And on the social side, it helps prevent you from looking like an inexperienced rider, which is nice.) And it does this all without the help of gyroscopes, which, Honda claims, are too heavy for motorcycles—and also bring the unfortunate side effect of spoiling the riding experience.

Instead, the robotics arm of Honda was dispatched for the task. To do so, the team borrowed from and tweaked a pre-existing technology found in the UNI-CUB—a cute, sit-down “personal mobility device”—to fit this new application.

BMW built something similar for its centennial not long ago, but that concept looked strictly, well, like a concept—bereft of any actually functioning parts and more of a statement for future design and technology. The Honda version, on the other hand, looks production-ready and handsome, too. And as you can see in the video below—by the looks of things, it works. And it’s mesmerizing to watch. Your move, cars.